By promising to fix Victoria’s budget, Jess Wilson has put a big target on her back

Australian political orthodoxy has long held that the best way to win an election from opposition against a long-term government is to make as little noise as possible.

Such is the agreed wisdom of small target electioneering it is now the exception, rather than the rule, for anyone with designs on the big job to promise much of anything.

The most spectacular jailbreak from campaign confinement was the father of programmatic specificity, Kevin Rudd, who spent the entire 2007 federal election year acting as though he was already in the Lodge.

The stand-out Ruddism of this period was the Labor leader calling his own national climate summit at Parliament House and inviting the actual prime minister, John Howard, to attend as a guest.

The late, beloved columnist Matt Price quipped at the time: “What extraordinary value voters are getting for their taxpayer dollars – two federal governments for the price of one”.

Howard was a regret at the summit, of course, leaving Rudd an uncontested lectern from which to declare climate change the great moral challenge of our generation. When Rudd squibbed his own moral test three years later by shelving plans for an emissions trading scheme, his leadership was cooked beyond the IPCC’s worst-case modelling.

Jess Wilson in her six months as Victorian opposition leader has had plenty of people in her ear cautioning her against premature policy reveal. Her job is to keep her own party’s dysfunctions out of the headlines and let the government’s shortcomings speak for themselves.

To the delight of the Labor Party, Wilson over the past week has veered wildly from this approach. In a speech to a Liberal fundraising lunch and again in her formal, budget reply as shadow treasurer, Wilson outlined her “10-year economic plan” to return Australia’s most indebted state to fiscal respectability.

In her speeches, Wilson committed a future Coalition government to a significant savings policy and an ambitious budgetary goal.

The savings measure is a hiring freeze on back office jobs across all government departments and select government agencies. The idea of a Coalition government putting the clamps on the public service is hardly radical, but the forecast reduction of more than 7000 jobs over her first four years in office would require a big squeeze.

Her budgetary goal is to put the state of Victoria back into the black by delivering a cash surplus by 2032.

In a wonky way, this is her swinging for the fiscal fence. A cash surplus requires the government to spend less on operating activities and capital expenditure than it generates in revenue. The last time the Victorian government did this was 2015-16, when the Big Build was just a twinkle in John Setka’s eye.

Given Victoria is forecast to deliver cash deficits totalling $30.5 billion over the next four years, a surplus in 2032 would require a major turnaround in the state’s finances. It signals Wilson’s intention to start a serious conversation about retiring debt – a topic so 1990s it might have been lifted from an episode of Melrose Place.

While Wilson was making her speech to the fundraiser, a massive, digital debt clock was projected on a screen behind her, counting the state’s net debt up from $163 billion and change. Although the idea is a little gimmicky, it was mesmerising to watch those numbers spin around.

Whether it can pierce public apathy about government debt is another matter.

The US national debt was $US2.7 trillion and George H Bush was president when developer Seymour Durst erected his famous debt clock near Times Square in New York. This year the clock skipped past $US38 trillion ($53 trillion). No one on either side of the congressional aisle appears to be losing much sleep over it.

Wilson, a self-described policy nerd, wants to make budget responsibility cool again. It is a pointy-headed aspiration but for Victoria’s sake, desperately needed.

For the best part of 20 years, there was bipartisan agreement in this state that budgets should be balanced and debt kept to manageable levels. It is why Steve Bracks and John Brumby governed for as long and as well as they did.

Daniel Andrews shattered this consensus. When he came to government in November 2014, state debt was $21 billion. By 2028-29 it will cost half this to pay our annual interest bill.

Wilson says it is this figure – the fast rising cost of interest – that is already stopping the government from spending money it otherwise could on hospitals, schools and roads. Adopting the language of Rudd, she describes economic management as a moral obligation.

“When governments live within their means, families can afford to live within theirs,” she told the luncheon.

The immediate effect of Wilson’s future budget commitments was to energise an angry Community and Public Sector Union and kick the Labor campaign machine into gear.

As soon as Wilson took the stage at the Liberal campaign event, old-school Labor ads were running on Instagram depicting Wilson as the cost-cutting love child of Jeff Kennett and Margaret Thatcher.

Now that she has declared her intention to balance Victoria’s books, Wilson has plenty to work ahead to chart a credible path to a cash surplus.

The Treasurer’s Private Office calculates that when you combine the budget she would inherit and the promises she has made to cut various taxes, she needs to find an extra $43 billion to make her plan stack up.

Wilson disputes this figure and given its source, a degree of scepticism is required.

But having started an unfashionable conversation about retiring debt, Wilson may as well go the full Kev.

Call a summit. Invite the premier. And if and when the time comes, don’t fail your own test.

Chip Le Grand is state political editor.

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